No. He was not a “mass shooter”. Mass shooters shoot innocent civilians en masse. This guy was an assassin. One target, one goal.
While I obviously agree that it can’t be described accurately as a mass shooting, I still wonder:
Do the victims need to be innocent for it to be a mass shooting?
From a philosophical POV there’s a issue of defining what an innocent person is (I mean some Christian societies will say that nobody’s innocent). Is innocence to be judged through the eyes of the shooter or society?
Anyway, that wasn’t the point I set out to make, so let’s set that aside.
Suppose one was to go to a convention of child molesters, war criminals, and nazi death camp guards, and you start shooting indiscriminately. I hope we can agree that members of the categories listed should be classified as “not innocents” by any contemporary standard. Even if only people guilty of the previously mentioned things got hit, wouldn’t it still be a mass shooting once a certain number had been shot?
While I obviously agree that it can’t be described accurately as a mass shooting, I still wonder:
Do the victims need to be innocent for it to be a mass shooting?From a philosophical POV there’s a issue of defining what an innocent person is (I mean some Christian societies will say that nobody’s innocent). Is innocence to be judged through the eyes of the shooter or society?
Anyway, that wasn’t the point I set out to make, so let’s set that aside.
Suppose one was to go to a convention of child molesters, war criminals, and nazi death camp guards, and you start shooting indiscriminately. I hope we can agree that members of the categories listed should be classified as “not innocents” by any contemporary standard. Even if only people guilty of the previously mentioned things got hit, wouldn’t it still be a mass shooting once a certain number had been shot?